The events of 2005 with undoubtedly the deepest impact on France itself were the ethnic minority riots that began in late October in satellite towns around Paris and during three weeks spread to the rest of the country. This dispelled any justified sense of French superiority in terms of racial and religious integration. Of wider consequence was the refusal of the French people in a May 29 referendum to endorse a new constitution for the European Union. This decision, in which France more or less brought to a halt the process of European integration that it had helped launch half a century earlier, left the EU functioning under existing treaty rules. On June 1 the Dutch also voted “no” in a similar referendum. The constitution’s failure to win popular approval in these two founder states effectively doomed it. Another 9 of the 25 EU member states had already ratified it through their parliaments, but the constitutional blueprint required unanimous approval by all 25 for the new constitution to enter into effect.

The unexpected May 29 result had widespread consequences. At home it looked likely to hasten the political demise of Pres. Jacques Chirac well before his second term expired in 2007 and possibly to realign the political left along the lines on which it split over the EU. Abroad it put France—for the first time—on the opposite side of a major EU issue from Germany, its longtime special partner, and sparked a wider debate about the EU’s purposes and goals. One reason for the French “no” vote was dislike of the recent EU enlargement to Eastern Europe and an accompanying aversion to further enlargement that would incorporate Turkey and countries in the Balkans in coming years.

Domestic Affairs

The spark for the autumn riots was the accidental death on October 27 of two teenagers who were electrocuted when they hid from police in an electricity substation. This was the immediate pretext for the start of the riots, but the reason they spread so rapidly was the high unemployment, discrimination, and lack of opportunity in France’s heavily immigrant suburbs. The protests peaked on the night of November 7, affecting 274 communes around the country. The following day President Chirac declared a state of emergency. It was not until November 17, after nearly 9,000 cars had been torched and nearly 3,000 arrests made, that the French police declared that the level of car burning had returned to “normal.” The state of emergency continued through the end of the year.

Expressing discontent in a milder way, French voters rejected the draft constitution—by 54.68% to 45.32%—and thereby turned their back on something that was largely their country’s creation. President Chirac said, in the closing stages of the referendum campaign, that the constitution was “essentially of French inspiration in terms of its ideas and authors.” One of his presidential predecessors, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, had presided over the special convention that provided the blueprint for the EU constitution. Giscard had ensured that the draft constitution provided for a more permanent presidency of the EU and for unified control of foreign policy so that the EU could assume a higher profile in the world—very much a preoccupation of Paris.

The draft constitution, however, failed to cater to the French people’s more pressing worry about unemployment and, in particular, to provide some “social protection” against market deregulation coming from Brussels and globalization from outside France. Against a background of increasing disenchantment with EU liberalization and disciplines such as state aid controls, many French took exception to the European Commission’s so-called Bolkestein directive on services. This controversial directive, proposed in 2004 by then European commissioner Frits Bolkestein, sought to open up all service sectors to cross-border competition. The domestic context was also conducive to a “no” in the referendum campaign. Unemployment in France remained persistently high, and the government’s political stock fell further when Finance Minister Hervé Gaymard was forced to resign on February 25 after it emerged that the state was paying €14,000 (about $18,500) a month to house Gaymard, his wife, and their eight children when the couple already owned a Paris apartment. Gaymard was succeeded by Thierry Breton, who came from France Télécom to be France’s fourth finance minister in a year.

At the start of 2005, the polls showed the “yes” camp standing at 65%, and on February 28 the constitution was easily endorsed by a special session of both houses of Parliament. By mid-March, however, polls were showing a majority of voters opposed, with pro-European support slipping particularly among Socialists, who were worried that EU policies were threatening France’s “social model” built around high job protection. Chirac complained to fellow leaders at a March EU summit that free-market economics had become “the new communism [or totalitarian doctrine] of our age.” The French government offered pay concessions to civil servants and pressed the European Commission to impose emergency quotas on surging Chinese textile imports but never regained control of the referendum campaign. Chirac had a rough ride in a mid-April television debate that brought him face to face with the tendency of referenda to become a magnet for extraneous issues. In early May polls showed that the “yes” camp had briefly regained the lead, but it did not hold.

While refusing to take the referendum defeat personally, Chirac nonetheless sacked Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who had lingered on borrowed time since the centre-right’s election setbacks of 2004. Chirac faced the awkward choice of a successor as prime minister: his longtime protégé Dominique de Villepin or his rival and head of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, Nicolas Sarkozy. In the end the president named Villepin prime minister and allowed Sarkozy to return to government (as interior minister) and to run the UMP, the very combination of party and government jobs that Chirac had earlier refused to allow Sarkozy to hold. The other immediate consequence of the referendum was a further deepening of divisions within the Socialists, the main opposition party. Former prime minister Laurent Fabius had defied an earlier party decision to support the EU constitution and had become the most prestigious politician in the “no” camp.

There was also serious rivalry on the centre-right. Villepin focused the first few months of his premiership on a modest attack on unemployment (changing the labour code for small firms and making it harder for the unemployed to refuse job offers) and on a modest boost to consumption (proposing some income-tax exemptions and simplification). These policies, together with public appreciation of his dashing style, raised Villepin’s standing in the polls by early autumn to the level enjoyed by Sarkozy. Chirac’s hospitalization for several days in early September because of a vascular problem affecting his vision underlined the unlikelihood that the 72-year-old president would seek a third term in 2007.

Foreign Affairs

Chirac’s close partnership with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder came to an end with the latter’s defeat in Germany’s general election on September 18. The slightly more reform-minded and pro-American Angela Merkel, who succeeded as chancellor, had to share power in a “grand coalition” with Schröder’s Social Democrats, one of whom she named as foreign minister. The German election’s clearest lesson for Chirac and Villepin was to confirm their view that in continental Europe reform could be only a gradual process.

Paris still remained on better terms with Berlin than with London. The friction was due to the resurgence, at every EU summit during the year, of the Anglo-French differences over the EU budget; the budget was eventually finalized in a deal in December. Paris, which had been the hot favourite to host the 2012 Olympics, also had to bear the disappointment of being beaten out by London. The bombings in London the day after its Olympic selection, however, served to toughen U.K. antiterrorist policy, a move welcomed by French authorities, who had complained of British laxity on this score.

France’s relations with the U.S. improved, starting with a conciliatory visit to Paris in February by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a meeting between Chirac and Pres. George W. Bush later that month. One reason for the warming of relations was that the EU in general, and France in particular, backed off the idea of ending the EU’s long-standing arms embargo on China. There was a broader coincidence of Franco-American policies on the Middle East, although not on Iraq, where the two countries’ views remained as divided as ever. France and the U.S. jointly pressed Syria to end its occupation of Lebanon, while France worked with the U.K., Germany, and the U.S. to try to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear program.

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